Think Pascal is an excellent development system for the Macintosh.It was released by Think Technologies in 1986 as Lightspeed Pascal.Think Technologies was bought by Symantec, and the name was changedto Think Pascal. Part of it was that Pascal is a moreforgiving language than C, and also nicer to use with the Mactoolbox, but an equal part was the qualities of Think Pascal as adevelopment system. Today, that old code is known as SpriteAnimation Toolkit. Iconverted the C code I was working on to Pascal, and saw howdevelopment speed was multiplied. I gave it a few more shots, and was hooked. And, I was astonished to see how easy it was!Think Pascal nailed my errors far quicker than any of the othersystems I knew, and I used the debugger efficiently almost withoutbeing aware of it. For some reason, I tried Think Pascal when doing it.Actually, I think the reason was that TransSkel was made for Thinkrather than Turbo. One day, a friend had an old Pascal program that he wanted to runon the Mac. I started programming the Mac with Borland's Turbo Pascal, andswitched to Think C since that's what everybody recommended, and Ineeded something a bit more professional than Turbo, something thatcould handle more than one source file at a time. Still,I don't claim that I know everything about either of them. Ihave developed large amounts of code with Think Pascal, and I believethat I know both Mac programming and Think Pascal pretty well. I, Ingemar Ragnemalm, have no official status with Symantec andThink Pascal, but am basically just a long-time satisfied user. Let's make a note in the"good reputation" column! About the author
TURBO PASCAL MAC UPDATE
We should bethankful to both Rich for making the update and for Symantec forproviding it.
Note, however, that it is provided as an unofficial update.You can get no support whatsoever for it from Symantec! Version 4.5d4was made by Rich Siegel (of BBEdit fame), who was in the pastresponsible for the official updates of Think Pascal.
The fact that you can download the complete compiler forfree means that we have a complete free development system forthe Mac! This page is written in order to help you get started with ThinkPascal 4.5, the newest version of Think Pascal, freely downloadableoff the net. OK, so what's so great with the debugger?.Using Sprite Animation Toolkit from 4.5d4.
TURBO PASCAL MAC PATCH
News: (May 2000)There is a patch to make Think Pascal 4.5 compatible with newerversions of MacOS! And this time it works! See" How do I get it" below. Ingemar's guide to Think Pascal 4.5d4 Free Mac development using Think Pascal 4.5 written by IngemarRagnemalm.